Michael Cusack on YOLO: Rainbow Trinity
YOLO: Rainbow Trinity © Cusack Creatures / Princess Pictures
Michael Cusack is making a pledge for being the busiest man in animation. The showrunner of Adult Swim’s blossoming flagship series Smiling Friends (alongside co-creator Zach Hadel) and Hulu’s alternate reality superhero romp Koala Man has now delivered the third season of his long-running series YOLO, named Rainbow Trinity. Starting as a series of shorts independently made dating back to 2012, YOLO follows Rachel and Sarah as they become tangled in nonsensical hijinks in this surreal version of Cusack’s native Australia.
We caught up with Cusack to chat about the new series, the differences in the shows he runs and the art of crappy animation.
You’ve had these characters rattling around in your head for more than a decade now, what makes you want to keep telling stories about them?
When I got season one, I was actually worried that I couldn’t come up with anything for these characters other than what was done in the shorts. But it was a good challenge to try to come up with more stuff and fall in love with it again, but at this point, I feel like I’m really in love with all the characters in YOLOand they’ve all popped up by accident. That’s the fun part, going in blind, and then coming across a fun character, and then they become part of the world of the show. It’s fun because it’s low stakes too, compared to Smiling Friends where I get out a different vibe with the writing, with YOLO it feels like you can screw it up a little bit more for the fun of it.
Do you feel like you’re exercising different muscles with each show you work on?
Absolutely, Smiling Friends is a great collaborative show because working with another animator and writer like Zach produces things I would never come up with on my own. It’s actually much easier to watch Smiling Friends after the fact, because I’ll cringe at stuff I do just on my own more. I don’t know why. I think it’s because you’ve only got yourself to blame, you’re fully responsible for it, if you look back at a few years later and something was off you’re just like, ‘Why didn’t I pick up on that?’ You also have to be careful that you don’t use the same idea from Smiling Friends in Koala Man, you’ve got to be conscious about where the genesis of your ideas have come from and what’s appropriate for each project, which took me a while to really get right.
How would you describe your comedic style, and how would you differentiate between a Smiling Friends joke vs a YOLO joke?
It’s a lot of just feeling it out. I have the advantage with YOLO to distinguish it more by doing more Aussie tropes or observational Australian humor. With Smiling Friends, Zach and I will come up with something and fall in love with it, and then it just breeds a whole rabbit hole and I think original things come out of that. The other issue is there’s only so many things in the world. Let’s just say I came up with a big monster in Koala Man. I’ll then be worried if I can put a big monster in the other shows. Like, of course you can, it’s not like you came up with big monsters. That’s where I used to screw up a lot.
YOLO: Rainbow Trinity © Cusack Creatures / Princess Pictures
I think every creative gets in their head about repeating themselves.
Yeah, I get very self critical and I realize it’s a detriment and works against me if I get too into that mindset. So I’ve tried to train and get out of that negative spiral and just have fun with it, especially because they’re cartoons. It also helps to collaborate, it just makes it funner and it feels like more creativity will come out that way.
You’ve talked before about how endearing and comedic crappy animation can be and I think some of my favorite moments in YOLO are when the animation just makes no sense. There’s a moment in this new season where a car flies off and then darts away at a 70 degree angle and it just looks funny. How considered are those moments? Are you microanalysing the way the car flings off or do you just say ‘fuck it’?
A lot of the time going ‘fuck it’ works. Sometimes you have to be very specific like, no, the car has to go three frames this way and then that way to make the joke land. It’s quite contextual. Those ideas usually come out of trying to get rid of something, for instance, the car has to leave, but do you do it in a boring way where just drives down the street, or do you take advantage and make it disappear in a creative way, because you can, there’s no rules in this show, so why not do it in a fun way? Same with Sarah and Rachel. If they go on an adventure or wherever, a lot of times I would just fly them out of the roof or something weird, just to change it up a bit so they’re not just walking out of the house and going there, because it’s not the show for that, it should be weird.
YOLO: Rainbow Trinity © Cusack Creatures / Princess Pictures
Do you feel like as your budgets get bigger, you find yourself fighting to maintain some of the crappiness?
A bit. Though YOLO’s budget didn’t increase that much, the issue sometimes you can get is the more production gets stacked onto it, the more it can channel down the direction of being more normal, it can get boarded a bit more normal. So you always have to be on top of saying ‘This can be crappy. This bit can be bad.’
Having voiced a lot of characters yourself for a lot of your career, have you had to learn the skill of directing voice actors?
Maybe this didn’t help at all, but when I was 20, I made a feature film that was very, very low budget, extremely indie where I funded it myself, and there was years and years of ADR directing on that because we dubbed all the voices afterwards. With ADR, you learn to accommodate different actors and some of them can get more insecure in a voice booth or they worry about their performance, so trying to facilitate that too and make actors feel comfortable I felt I learned during that process. That’s the golden rule, just making sure that the actor feels comfortable, not worried about anything, reassuring that we’re not recording on tape or anything expensive, that they can do a million takes to get it right, trying to not have too many people staring at them on Zoom, keeping it small and comfortable is nice.
YOLO: Rainbow Trinity – plus the other 2 seasons – are available on Channel 4 in the UK and Ireland.